1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to brand advertising in an online social context.
2. Background Art
Traditionally, a brand is associated with a product or service which has gained or has been provided with an identity. A purpose of a brand is to differentiate itself from competitors. A brand may be represented by a bundle of tangible (e.g., functional product and/or service characteristics) and/or intangible (e.g., emotional and/or symbolic) meanings that add value to the brand. A brand may be associated with any type of product and service. A few well known example brands include Legos™ (a toy brand), BMW™ (an automobile manufacturer brand), and Merrill Lynch™ (a financial management and advisory company brand). Brands may also be associated with entities that are less tangible, including personalities (e.g., Lindsey Lohan, Michael Jordan, Oprah), movie franchises (e.g., Star Wars™, Harry Potter), television franchises (e.g., the television shows “Lost” and “The Office”), and sports franchises (e.g., The Dallas Cowboys, The New York Yankees).
Advertising is a form of communication used to inform potential customers about products and services, and how to obtain and/or use them. Advertisers are constantly searching for improved ways of connecting with potential customers. In recent years, online advertising has become more prevalent. Online advertising is a form of advertising that uses the Internet and World Wide Web in order to deliver marketing messages and attract customers. Typical techniques for online advertising include the posting of “banner ads” on webpages, providing contextual ads on search engine results pages, and email marketing, which may include the sending of email spam.
Social networking services exist on the World Wide Web that are intended to build online social networks for communities of people having common interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Such services provide various ways for users to interact, including blogging, discussion groups, email, file sharing, instant messaging, online chat, video, voice chat, etc. Social networking services such as MySpace.com™ and Facebook™ enable users to create self-description pages (also referred to as a “profile page”), and enable the users to link their pages with pages of friends.
Advertisers are targeting social networking services as a relatively new advertising frontier. For example, advertisers may provide banner ads that appear when users of MySpace.com™ of Facebook™ view their own profile pages, when they view profile pages of their linked friends, and/or when they view other pages of these websites. Furthermore, Facebook™ includes applications that enable further types of advertising. For example, Facebook™ includes an application called “HotLists,” which enables users to select and list topics of interest in their profile page. A selected topic appears as a graphical icon (a “Stylepix”) in the user's profile page. A user may click on the topic icon to open a webpage that may provide further information regarding the topic.
The advertising provided by the HotLists application is enhanced by the users of Facebook™. For instance, a user may notice a topic icon in a friend's profile page that represents a topic of interest to the user. The user may add the topic icon to the user's own profile page if the user desires to express his/her interest in the topic. In this manner, information regarding the topic may be spread between users without needing direct action from the advertiser.
Such advertising schemes provided by social networking services have disadvantages, however. For instance, the topic icons of the HotLists application in Facebook™ are presented with little to no variability. What is desired is an online advertising technique useable in a social networking environment that takes advantage of the social network to provide more relevant, interesting, and variable advertising to the social network participants.